


Up on the shore

by queerly_it_is



Category: Borderlands, Tales from the Borderlands - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-05-22 13:22:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6080937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queerly_it_is/pseuds/queerly_it_is
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not like Vaughn has time to be hanging around the infirmary anyway.</p>
<p>For the first week or so they don’t even <em>have</em> an infirmary, until someone asks him where they’re supposed to put the people who get limbs torn off by threshers, who get shot by bandits or burned by acid or who just manage to hurt themselves by combining sheer incompetence with rocks, high places, or fire.</p>
<p>So they clear the rubble out of what used to be the executive lounge, make beds out of whatever they can find, and that’s where they put their wounded when Pandora grants them wounded. That’s where they put Rhys after the scavenging team brings him in, missing an arm and an eye and apparently his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Up on the shore

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on tumblr, added to and cleaned up a little.

It’s not like Vaughn has time to be hanging around the infirmary anyway.

For the first week or so they don’t even _have_ an infirmary, until someone asks him where they’re supposed to put the people who get limbs torn off by threshers, who get shot by bandits or burned by acid or who just manage to hurt themselves by combining sheer incompetence with rocks, high places, or fire.

So they clear the rubble out of what used to be the executive lounge, make beds out of whatever they can find, and that’s where they put their wounded when Pandora grants them wounded. That’s where they put Rhys after the scavenging team brings him in, missing an arm and an eye and apparently his mind.

It’s where Vaughn stands, time slipping through the hands he’s got balled up against his thighs, looking down at Rhys – _not_ Rhys, but a shell shaped like Rhys that stares blankly at the ceiling and says nothing, responds to nothing, before he walks out and finds a quiet place to throw up and let the shaking go all through him before stumbling to his feet and going back to work, because there’s nobody else. There’s just nobody else.

Weeks of getting them power and building them fences and sending people out to look for supplies, of fending off wildlife and bandits and burying the ones they lose, and every night he walks the corridors, checks the monitors, assigns the sentries. He tiredly straightens and answers questions when they inevitably come to him with their _What do we do about_ s and _How should we_ s, a carousel of scared eyes and frayed nerves turning up in his path over and over.

And when Vaughn’s feet carry him down near the infirmary he hits the wall until his hand is throbbing and pulls himself the other way, seeing Rhys with a sheet up to his chin, gauze covering his eye and where the port used to be, and nothing, just nothing on his face. Rhys just eating what he’s fed and going where he’s put, totally absent for all of it. Seeing it as clearly as if he had gone in there, throat just as clogged and stomach just as twisted.

Vaughn wonders, forcing his body down into his narrow excuse for a bed, eyelids scraping, head throbbing, who exactly he’s torturing – himself for not being there, or Rhys for not being here. Wonders whether no escape or no return is the worse kind of hell, knowing he could’ve learned to live in hell if he just hadn’t been left alone in it.

With that blind spot he’s made, it’s too long before he hears about the shrine, about the steady stream of people to Rhys’ bedside. About the ones who go like a pilgrimage to leave food and gifts for their Great Liberator, and that’s maybe a partial excuse for how hard he lays into them, until he’s hoarse and shaking in the shoulders. He yells until he’s gone past yelling and into a kind of white-hot lungless whisper, until they won’t even look at him, lining the wall stiff and terrified as only Hyperion employees know how to be.

Vaughn feels sick with it then, all at once, with himself and with them, but especially with that vacant body under the sheet. Sick like something vital in him’s tearing right down the seam. He hates it and he can’t fix it and he’s the only one who understands how much is missing, who sees how wrong it is.

_You didn’t know him_ sticks in his airway. _You didn’t love him_ strangles him quiet. The funeral air makes him nauseous. So he wrenches himself away again, navigating blind as everything blurs and he chokes on it all, how much he wants to grip Rhys’ shoulder and scream at him, confess to him, plead with him, bargain for something he can actually live with. _Anything else_ , he’d swear if he could face it. _Just not this._ A little hope is crueller than none at all, just enough to poison, to leave you haunted.

When they put up the statue, Vaughn nods and doesn’t say anything. When he passes the infirmary again he looks through the door, to the bed in the corner, that bit of hope shifting like shrapnel. He’s so tired.

He walks across the room and dumps his body into a chair, knees turned to water, ribcage bending like a wishbone as his breath heaves. He’s empty of everything, even excuses, just the drumming on his sternum left, pounding like a prisoner’s fist.

“So I really fucking miss you,” he says, casual except for the rust, except for his hands in his lap, trembling away. He adjusts the edge of the sheet, rubs at the stubble turning to beard along his jaw. “I miss you and you’re right here. You should be right here, because I can’t—” He bites his lip, tasting copper. “I’m sorry,” he says then. “Sorry I haven’t—I was being selfish. It’s not your fault. Look, just come back, okay? When you’re ready. I’ll wait. I’m here now.” His palm rests on Rhys’ chest, following the rise and fall of it, moving to Rhys’ cheek as his eyes fill up and then overflow. “I’m right here.”

From there it’s every day, even when he can hardly bear it. He talks until his voice runs down, and then he mouths the words, because it’s all the same. People leave him alone when he comes in, same as he does with their statue, their shrine, like they’ve divvied up what they pray to, like it’ll ever be as abstract for him as it is for them. Vaughn folds his hand around Rhys’ fingers and just sits, in a standoff.

They get the base into as good a shape as it’s going to be, and he does the same for the people, until they don’t need him quite so much, don’t panic quite as easily, until he’s left alone for whole hours at a time. The bandits learn to stay away, even if the monsters don’t. Cassius is even growing fruit trees. Vaughn looks around and realises they’re actually surviving, and laughs, wondering when they got good at this. If it keeps up, he’ll send some people to Hollow Point, try and find Fiona and Sasha.

“He’s awake,” someone says to him one day in the control room, standing close at his shoulder by the consoles. “Like, really awake.” It’s Lao, with her sniper rifle slung across her back, a spiky shadow in her home-made armour of spiderant plating, her eyes on his. Vaughn doesn’t ask, just takes off, thoughts shutting down.

There’s a crowd, but it’s silent, and they’re all outside the room, standing along the walls for the entire stretch of the corridor. Vaughn doesn’t get it until they step out of his way, nodding at him and offering smiles, some of them putting hands on his shoulder as he passes. It’s enough to knock him back a step, but he pushes forward and into the room and towards the bed with—

“Rhys,” he says, and it comes out of him like a knife, hurting more than it did going in, with a lot more blood.

Day after day of the blank stare, he’d forgotten what its opposite looks like, especially focused on him. Rhys actually inhabiting his body, sitting up in the bed, thin and tired and uneasy, but really there. Vaughn manages another step, two.

“Uh, hi,” Rhys says, voice that’s not a voice, all creak and rasp, a foggy stare as he drops his fingers from prodding at the gauze. It leaves Vaughn reaching for the back of the chair, white-knuckling it. “I think so? And you’re...”

“Vaughn,” Vaughn tells him, past the stone in his throat, the taste in his mouth like ash, hit in the gut and just trying to stay upright, to stay in this hello when he never got a goodbye.

“Vaughn,” Rhys repeats, smiling a little, taking so much of the sting right out of the unfairness of it. The chair’s holding up most of Vaughn’s weight now, and he’s looking at Rhys through a film of water. “Right, yeah. Uh. So... where am I?”

“You don’t remember,” Vaughn says, like he needs to carve it into himself, biting down on the _me_ and the _us_ and a hundred other things until he thinks his teeth are going to split.

“Sorry,” Rhys says, glancing away, around the room, at the expensive veneer panelling and the richly-decorated fixtures. The pictures of Jack all ended up on the firing range. Rhys used to talk about it with him, what it’d be like getting in here, VIPs with their future all in gold. It feels like a dream now, that life. “Seems like a nice place.”

“Not really,” Vaughn says, and Rhys’ eyebrow ticks up. “But you get used to it. Some of it’s not so bad.” His heart’s kicking painfully, a drowning kind of flail as he falls into the seat. “I’ll, uh. I’ll show you around later, if you want.” The garden, maybe, the promise of it.

“Yeah,” Rhys says, smiling a faraway kind of half-smile, looking at him with something like hope, that kind of fragile. “Hey, you’re the guy in charge, right? Do we know each other?”

That hurts, like a fracture that’s healed wrong or not at all, and Vaughn does a bad job of hiding it, can feel himself blanching. Rhys is wincing like he knows he’s just done something wrong even if he isn’t sure what.

All the things he wants to say, none of it good enough. _You were a hero, or not a hero, and it stopped mattering to me a long time ago. If I’d known it was all borrowed I would have done it differently. Before all this dirt, we had stars_.

Finally Vaughn puts on as much of an unwounded look as he can manage, just nails it into the framework of his face. “I guess not,” he says, evenly, burying the ache, the new distance he’s swapped for the old one.

If he’d ever been brave enough to swear he’d take anything else, he would have meant it. Given the choice, he’d take obstacles over emptiness.

“But I’d like to,” he says then, “if you would.” He holds out his hand, and it stays steady even when Rhys takes it, even if it’s the only part of him that does.

“Yeah,” Rhys nods, palm warm and dry against Vaughn’s. “Yeah, I would. Thanks. Guess there’s a lot I need to catch up on, huh?”

Vaughn manages a shrug, heavy like old gears suddenly forced to turn. He’s still holding onto Rhys’ hand, a little helpless, and Rhys’ face says he’s noticed, but it’s one thing at least, an initial honesty. Maybe they can rebuild without all the walls, the secret compartments. Maybe he can stop defining it by what he’s hiding. He’s lost track of what they do and don’t deserve.

“There’s a few things,” he says finally, settling into it, this new structure. He’s getting good at that. “But there’s lots of time. We can take it slow. I promise I’ll tell you everything.”

Who will they be then, either of them? Vaughn has no idea.

It’s worth finding out.

Rhys’ smile is slower, softer. He doesn’t take his hand back.

**Author's Note:**

> I can be found [here](http://queerly-it-is.tumblr.com) on tumblr


End file.
